The Price of Challenging Love
by Moonlit Aria
Summary: "The game of life and death, love and hate, tenderness and abuse. It was all a game and it was a game he had been good at playing . . . until love interrupted it and wormed its way into the small sphere of their existence." [ Original Sin vignette. ]


  
  
- Author's Note: There's no sympathy for the poor bastard here, but I felt it was a good way to start off in this genre and fandom.  
  
  
  


**The Price of Challenging Love**

  
  
  


He had always known he was going to die young, thus he had lived his life to the fullest extent possible and relished in the fact that he had reached the ripe age of twenty-six before it all came tumbling down, like an ill-placed piece upon the top of a house of cards. Yet, when everything came right down to it, he found that life was a precious drug to which he was wholly addicted . . . and it was the slow withdraw of it that was causing his body to go numb in a frighteningly real manner.   
  
Death had been feigned before, on real stages and on the many he created for his schemes, but he had not realized how powerfully real it was. It had always been something he kissed fleetingly while living in the blissful moment, thinking only of the next game. The game of life and death, love and hate, tenderness and abuse. It was all a game and it was a game he had been good at playing . . . until love interrupted it and wormed its way into the small sphere of their existence.   
  
He had never loved, for he had never found the need. Truthfully, he used the word _love_ to describe the feelings welling within him that were anything _but_. He said he was the only one who could ever love her . . . but, honestly, he was the only one who could ever fully control her. Dominate, love. Love, dominate. It was all the same to him, anyway, wasn't it? To love was to dominate, control, care for . . . to dominate was to love, protect. No. Love was just the front for the lustful domination he felt, the need to control her as the only thing in life he could have power over. He could not make the sun rise and set at his will, but he could bend her to it like a flimsy wire. She had been his since he could remember and he had been content with that, content to use her as a means to obtain whatever end he wanted.   
  
Yet, she had began to slip from his grasp. Slowly, surely, she had become another's . . . someone who genuinely offered her that which he gave as merely a facade. The more he tried to control her, the more she slipped from him and to the offer of comfort, wholeness, and absolute warmth. Towards love. Towards _him_. Originally, he was to be their target, their easy target, and he was to be killed. Originally, he had had no qualms with sending her to the bed of another man, a complete stranger, as he had done so often since their early years together for whatever money her body could obtain . . . but, when love bloomed, it was something he could no longer stand for. She was his own and solely thus.   
  
And, he had failed to recapture her fully. Frighten her, perhaps, into doing his will, but something had pushed that fear aside. Love. Of course. It was so powerful an emotion that it chased away the thoughts of torture, the thoughts of pain, and the fears of punishment to the point that she had been willing to die to preserve that which she loved so dearly.   
  
Perhaps if he had told her he loved her and was jealous of her love of another, she might have come around more amply. But, the thought could not even come to him without rousing sarcastic laughter. He knew he didn't love her the least . . . he enjoyed her taste, her body, her blood, and how easily she gave in to his dominance . . . but he would never die willingly for her.   
  
When it had come down to it - giving her up, that is - he had not wanted that option and chose instead to confront her with the knife which has seared her flesh in punishment so many times before. He had been confident, arrogant even, that a pathetic whore and dying weakling stood no chance against his strength, the fear he instilled within her, and the weapon he drew threateningly along her neck. Exposing himself to the gun had been the biggest mistake of his life . . . and, as the metallic bullet lodged itself into his abdomen - a real bullet, not one of the blank cartridges he had ensured would be there - he felt as foolish as Antony, who had dared to challenge the might of Rome for his own gain. He had challenged love for what he always thought was rightfully his and was gunned down for his audacity.   
  
It was unbelievable. He didn't believe it. He believed, surely, the he was shot . . . but not that she had thrown him over for someone else. But, why not? He had abused her, physically and mentally, for the better half of her life, after giving her a name he felt fitting, then pushed her into the hands of strange men, after having her first for himself, for money. He had cut her, hit her, burned her, and forced his will upon her night after night, ensuring that she knew she was his, and eventually was driven to slicing away at her skin to remove a life he did not want from within her. And now, having found someone who would love her despite all of those flaws he had made sure she would have, she cast him aside into the arms of love while he died a slow death on the streets of Havana.   
  
Still, he reached out for her, begging for the first time in his life for her care, her soft fingers, her lips . . . and she had nearly given in.   
  
The heated kiss of another bullet told him, with a deathly voice, that she had, in fact, cast him aside. It burned in his chest - the bullet and the pain of being overthrown as master - and the only relief for the heat was to crumble forward onto the cold stone beneath him.   
  
"He's dead," he heard her shakily announce, her voice trembling with the power she knew she had briefly held over him and the fact that his life had been taken, fully, by her hands.   
  
"_He_ needs a doctor."   
  
And, that was his end. Cast into the gutter he much deserved, Billy welcomed the slow and chilling darkness that languidly crept over his body . . . it was more comforting than the seemingly eternal sadness which had settled over him upon realizing what had happened to his Bonny.


End file.
